Their Cold, Dead Hands

It is the mantra of dedicated gun owners that if firearms are ever outlawed “you’ll have to pry mine from my cold, dead hands.”

They wear the slogan on T-shirts, stamp it on the outside of envelopes, e-mail it on the Internet and sometimes shout it over the phone.

The idea these heroes of our make-believe armies are trying to convey is, I guess, that there’s going to be one big shootout on their front porches if the government ever tries to kick in their doors and take their toys.

When the smoke clears, there will be left standing a guy looking faintly like Charlton Heston in his more virile years, assault rifles in both hands and bandoleers of ammo crisscrossing his chest.

The emotional imagery is enough to bring tears to a cowboy’s eyes.

I too used to think in battlefield terms when I was a kid growing up during World War II. With an imagination that would rival Walter Mitty’s I created a combat zone in my backyard where I stood alone against hordes of enemies and went down, guns blazing, to a hero’s death.

Then I was called up in a real war and realized when I saw friends blasted into body parts that there are no hero deaths in violent confrontation, only the agony and finality of oblivion.

I thought about that as I watched some kids playing the other day. It was the day after Denver.

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They were on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier, dodging in and out of sunbathers, shooting water guns at each other. Well, the afternoon was a sizzler and the water was cool, so why not?

In better days the idea of kids playing war or cops wasn’t anything to get all excited about, but these aren’t ordinary times. I mean, there was all that killing in Littleton the day before, and seeing kids with guns sent a chill through me. Even water guns.

It isn’t just Littleton. It’s all those other places where schools became killing fields for kids with real guns.

The ones I watched playing were maybe 8 or 9, and their guns were brightly colored, space-age rifles that could send a steady stream of water a dozen feet or so.

They blasted members of their family, the people around them and other kids in a chilling parody of what’s been happening lately. Even their laughter, placed in a different context, was the laughter of the shooters Tuesday at Littleton.

I stood watching for a long time, parked in my car by the beach, the radio on, listening to the grief and puzzlement emanating out of Colorado.

The sadness was palpable the day after Denver.

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As a result of the murders at Columbine High, all kinds of experts have come forward with explanations of how it happened. Lack of parental control, lack of personal responsibility, lack of school security, a status-divided campus and I don’t know what else.

The proliferation of firearms in our gun-nut society obviously plays a role. You’ve got to be a fool not to see that. But still, there’s the NRA insisting on celebrating itself and its wacko philosophies in a city not far from where the killings took place.

Though its “party” this week has been downscaled, its presence in Denver remains the same: to lobby for state laws that would allow the average guy to pack a concealed weapon. That’s what the country needs. More firepower on the street.

But it’s not all guns. The shootings in schools are symptomatic of a deeper cultural pathology. I’ve said it too often to say it again, but the ironies are implicit in everything we do. Violence is our name and violence is our game. Violence is fun. Violence is satisfying. Violence completes us.

I watched the boys on the beach. I heard the screams of other kids who didn’t want to be squirted. I heard the shouts of adults who wanted it all to stop. And I transposed all that to Littleton, Colo., and it was the same. The screams, the shouts, the demand to end the killings.

I used to hear from a man in Denver, one of those who said the government would have to pry his Beretta from his cold, dead hand. He’d e-mail me every time I wrote an anti-gun column and tell me I didn’t know what in the hell I was talking about.

Maybe I don’t. But this I do know: There are 15 gun-riddled bodies in Littleton, Colo., and, sadly, we’re going to have to pry their futures from their cold, dead hands.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.